Why I Built CW Ops: The Revenue Share Story

I built CW Ops in my own house. This is the story of why.

Two AI products in 18 months, two refunds

Between October 2024 and March 2026 I bought two well-marketed AI tools for e-commerce intelligence. One charged €99 a month. The other charged €149.

Both promised the same thing in different words: "AI-driven competitor insights for ambitious operators." Both had landing pages with the dashboards I needed, the workflow I imagined, and the price tag I could justify.

What I actually got from product one was a dashboard that took three weeks to populate, then surfaced things I already knew — what categories my competitors sold in, what their average price was. No new information. No insight. The "AI" was a paragraph summary at the top of every report, generated by a large language model from data I already had on a spreadsheet.

Product two was worse. I never saw the dashboard fully working. Two of its three advertised integrations were still in development the entire time I was a paying customer, with no shipping date in sight. Support tickets sat for nine days. I cancelled in month two.

Both refunded — eventually. Product one via Stripe portal, painlessly. Product two only after I cited Spanish consumer law in a four-paragraph email.

Total burned: about €700. Total time lost: bigger.

The €99-a-month vaporware tax

This pattern is not personal. It is industry-wide.

A small B2B SaaS today only has to do four things to charge €99 a month: ship a clean landing page, integrate one LLM API, set up Stripe checkout, run paid ads. The buyer cannot verify quality from the sales page. The seller has zero downside if the product is useless — they were paid month one regardless.

This is what economists call adverse selection. The market fills up with low-quality offerings precisely because buyers cannot distinguish them from real ones at purchase time. Real builders get drowned out. The whole category loses trust.

I felt this in my own buying journey, and I kept asking myself: what would a fair contract look like? Not a fair landing page. A fair contract.

Skin in the game, written into the price

CW Ops costs €49 a month. That is the base — the intelligence layer. It is intentionally less than the failed tools I bought, so the cost of trying is small.

Beyond that base, CW Ops charges 20% of your net monthly profit. The same 20% for every operator; the tier only changes how much CW Ops operates on your behalf, never the percentage.

If you make €1,000 net profit in a month, the share is €200, so you pay €249. If you make €2,000 net profit, the share is €400, so you pay €449. If you make €5,000 net profit, the share is €1,000, so you pay €1,049.

If you LOSE money in a month, you pay €49 only. The share never goes negative for me, and it is zero whenever you do not profit. The math is symmetric to the direction you care about: it goes UP when you go up, and it stops at zero when you go to zero.

This pricing makes my incentive equal to yours. I cannot ignore your account because the recurring €49 is already on the table — but I only earn a share when you actually profit, and never when you do not. The interesting work is in helping you go from €0 to €5,000, because that is the only path to the share existing at all.

This is what fair-contract pricing looks like.

What CW Ops actually does, day to day

You give CW Ops between 5 and 20 URLs of competitors. They can be Shopify stores, WooCommerce sites, marketplace listing pages, or direct brand sites with a public catalogue.

Every day, CW Ops fetches them. It logs what changed: new products in stock, prices that moved, ad creatives that appeared on Meta or Google, copy that rewrote.

Every morning at 7am you get a digest. Three sections: what your competitors did in the last 24 hours, what trends are emerging across your watchlist, and what opportunities I have flagged as worth a second look ("competitor in your category launched a product in the colour you do not currently stock — your search volume for that colour grew 18% this week").

The "AI" is not a paragraph at the top of a report. The AI is the difference between a raw change log of 200 events and an opportunity list of 4 things actually worth your time today.

The guarantee and the alignment, in one sentence

30 days. If you do not find a single opportunity you did not already know about, you write to me and I refund the €49. No retention call. No questions. The guarantee is in the terms of service, not in the marketing.

I make a share only when you make profit. You take no risk in trying. I take all of it.

This is the contract. The product is built around it.

Want to read what early users are saying? Real and aspirational stories →

Ready to give CW Ops 30 days? See pricing →

Jacobo López-Cortijo is a self-employed founder based in Cádiz, Spain, and the builder of CommonWealth Ops. He answers email at jacobolopezcortijo@gmail.com.